The Prisoners

Steel doors – guillotine gates – of the doorless house closed massively.

We were locked in with loss.

Guards frisked us, marked our wrists,then let us into the drab Rec Hall –splotched green walls, high windows barred –where the dispossessed awaited us.

Hands intimate with knife and pistol,hands that had cruelly grasped and throttledclasped ours in welcome.

I sensed the pleaof men denied:

Believe us humanlike yourselves, who but for Grace…We shared reprieving Hidden Wordsrevealed by the Godlike

One, whose crime was truth.

And I read poems I hoped were true.

It's like you been there, brother, been there,the scarred young lifer said.